42 headed back to the car after my tea wIth Hajji Dost. "As an Islamic Sandhurst," one of them replIed The analogy seemed right. The jihad underwritten by the C.I.A. and Saudj ArabIa brought together, traIned, and equipped a large army of Islamic mili- tants, and an army needs a war college. After the Soviets left Mghanistan and the C.I.A. closed down its pipeline to the mujahideen, there were tens of thousands of well-trained and well-armed Arab, Asian, and Mghan fighters available for new jihads. Some of them remained in Mghanistan, but many were absorbed by an informal net- work of Islamic activists orga- nized loosely into under- ground cells, with support centers scattered around the world. Such a pool of pro- fessional soldiers requires grooming and replenishment, and the University of Dawa and Jihad, situated not far from Peshawar, provides an admirable training base. Only thirteen miles from the Khyber Pass, with Mghanistan beyond, Pesh- awar is a rugged, lawless sort of place, riven by religious fervor and violence, and rich in political intrigue, a battleground for imperial armies and tribal warlords for centuries. When the Soviet Union in- vaded Mghanistan, the region was trans- formed into the major staging area for the jihad. During the nineteen-eighties, Islamic militants streamed in and out of Peshawar, a town of densely packed mud houses, pastel villas, and streets crowded with four-wheel-drive vehicles and don- key carts. Some thousand foreign "ji- hadis"-Arabs, Asians, Africans, and two dozen or so African-Americans-re- main in the city or are encamped in the mountain passes of the ungovernable tribal areas bordering Mghanistan. Ac- cording to American investigators who are in Pakistan attempting to garner clues to the World Trade Center bombing and to the killing of two American consulate officials in Karachi in March, Peshawar could now rank as one of the leading training grounds for terrorists from around the world, along with Teheran, Tripoli, and Beirut. " R AMZI YOUSEF," who has lived un- der at least fourteen other ali- ases-and travelled on nearly as many passports-over the last three years, is one of the soldiers spawned by the jihad, a twenty-seven-year-old Islamic militant who came of age on the Mghan battle- fields. He made his first trip to the United States in September of 1992, six months before a fifteen-hundred-pound bomb exploded in the underground ga- rage of the World Trade Center, in lower Manhattan. A thousand people were in- jured, six people died, and half a billion dollars in damage was done. "Y ousef" arrived at J.F.K. Airport from Peshawar on a connecting flight: Pakistan International Airlines' 703. He and a travelling companion, Ahmad Muhammad Ajaj, who is also believed to have fought in the jihad and trained at the University ofDawa and Jihad, separated before leaving the first-class section of the plane. When they arrived in the immigration lounge, Ajaj embarked on what investigators say was "a performance that was nothing short of incredible," and which was most likely aimed at deflecting attention from his companion-and perhaps other passen- gers-as they entered the United States. Ajaj, who is a bearded and swarthy Palestinian, presented a Swedish passport to the Immigration and Naturalization Service agent behind the desk. He was canying a Jordanian passport in his brief- case, along with a British passport and one from Saudi Arabia. The four pass- ports were all in different names. The I.N.S. agent looked at Ajaj and at the first passport with suspicion. The photo- graph on it seemed far too thick, and, with his fingernail, the agent peeled it of[ Underneath was the photograph of an- other man. Ajaj became agitated and began shouting. ("My mother was Swedish. If you don't believe me, check your com- puter.") When inspectors opened his leather bags, they found, to their aston- ishment, videotapes of suicide car bomb- ings, guides to planting land mines, and directions on how to forge documents and make large improvised bombs. Meanwhile, at a second immigration desk nearby, the man calling himself Ramzi Y ousef presented an Iraqi pass- port; he had no United States visa, but he did have a laminated identification card bearing his photograph from the Al- Bunyan Islamic Information Center, in THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 1995 Tucson, Ariwna. The card was issued under another name-Khurram Khan, which was also the name on Ajaj's Swed- Ish passport-and the I.N.S. agent was not convInced. But Y ouset: unlike Aiaj, did not create a scene, and smilingly asked for political asylum in the United States. Immigration agents remember a lean, bearded man with piercing dark eyes and a beaklike nose. He was dressed in a three-piece, Mghan-style silk suit, the knee-length top of which had "enor- mously puffed" sleeves and flowed down over shalwar pants. He raIsed his right hand and solemnly swore that he would be persecuted if he was not permitted to stay in the United States. 'What is your full true name?" the I.N.S. agent, Martha Morales, asked. "Ramzi Ahmed Y ouset:" the bearded man replied-despite the fact that the airline ticket on which he entered the United States, and the Iraqi passport on which he left Pakistan, were in the name of Azan Muhammad. According to her testimony later in court, Morales sug- gested that "Y ousef" be detained, but she was overruled by her superior. The immigration center was full, and the bearded man was told to appear before an I.N.S. judge for an asylum hearing on December 8th. He thanked Morales and disappeared into the streets of New York. Ajaj was sent directly from J.F.K. to jail, and he remained there until two days after the World Trade Center was bombed. He was later arrested and tried, along with three accomplices, for his role in the bombing. All four were convicted, and each was sentenced to two hundred and forty years in prison. D ESPITE their debt to the C.I.A., which funded and supplied the operatIon that created them, many of the children of the jihad, like "Ramzi Y ou- sef" and Ajaj, harbor an intense hatred of the United States. They object to its sup- port not only of Israel but of what they perceive to be corrupt secular Middle Eastern regimes. Clearly, this hostility was not what the C.I.A. had in mind in 1979, when it mounted what became the biggest covert operation sponsored by the United States since the Vietnam years. The civil war in Mghanistan today is fought by leaders who were supported by Washington, none of whom are by na- ture democratic, and all of whom to a